Today is September 11, the third anniversary of the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
I just saw a commercial on TV for an upcoming special on this, the greatest catastrophe that ever struck America.
It would have been more impressive if they hadn't run it in a break between two parts of The Blue and the Gray, a dramatization of a four-year Civil War. In that war, for instance, 23,000 Americans died on the field before the church at Shiloh in a single battle. In absolute terms, that's almost eight times as many people as died on September 11. In proportional terms ― remember that the population of the U.S. at that time was around 60 million ― that's about forty times as devastating as September 11. And that was just one battle, albeit a big one.
Posted by Don Harlow at September 11, 2004 06:15 PM